Mysterious red streak in astro frame?

If you can say where you heard about VR generating internal light, I'd love to know the link. VR senses motion, and I cannot imagine why VR would be involved witih IR, but the problem does seem internal.

This had to do with at least the VR system in the Nikon 16-35 AFS. You can search for it in the Nikon Lens forum and also at Thom Hogan's web page (he ran a survey in which he confirmed that not all copies had the issue).

I believe Marianne associated it with position feedback for the VR mechanism.

What is mysterious in this case is that the streak appears even with the VR system (and AF) switched off. What would that leave, position sensing of the aperture or focus distance? Long shot but not impossible maybe.